Scouring the Business of Technology

LibreOffice or OpenOffice?

The Document Foundation is a newly founded organisation with a mission: to make an office suite available as truly free software, developed within the wider community. Supported by companies like Google, Novell and Red Hat, the Foundation has forked the Oracle-owned OpenOffice software and created LibreOffice.

Worries about Oracle’s commitment to OpenOffice have persisted within the OpenOffice community since the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Most recently a lack of news at the OpenOffice conference and Oracle’s preview of a proprietary cloud-based office suite have added momentum to the push for an independent foundation for OpenOffice.

Although in the past there have been previous forks and attempts to create a more independent governance of OpenOffice, this appears to be the first attempt which has widespread community support. Other supporters of The Document Foundation include the Free Software Foundation, the OSI, OASIS, Canonical, credativ, Collabora and the GNOME Foundation, as well as Brazilian OpenOffice developers BRoffice and other regional OpenOffice community groups.